Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  There is still a third way of understanding his deception. Liberace lied. He lied outright. But, paradoxically, he told the truth as well, if not exactly as Proust, much less Foucault, might have predicted he would. While he lied about having sex with other men, he did respect convention, and he did honor social mores. If cavaliers and peasants might have frolicked with other men for hundreds of years, bourgeois morality, from the nineteenth century especially, coupled with powerful Christian biases, put men and boys like Walter Liberace in a very tight spot. How might one respect convention and traditional mores on the one hand, and, on the other, honor one’s own sexual instincts and affectional preferences as a gay male? What happened when those very proclivities violated semi-sacred social norms? Another way of framing the question: Is it possible for a man to believe in traditional social norms and conventional sexuality—as Liberace testified that he did—and still have sex with other men? The easiest answers might be the best. Perhaps the solution is either to share Foucault’s notion that “compulsory heterosexuality” forces dishonesty among gay men, or to concede that Liberace indulged in practical, predictable, self-defense and self-serving hypocrisy, whether justified or not. There is another solution to the conundrum, however, though it is rather more complicated.

  What would it mean to believe genuinely in conventional mores on the one hand and to practice homosexual activity on the other? Phrased a little differently, what would it mean to be a public conservative and a private radical? To be so suggests, most critically, a profound separation between public and private. The former, defined by law, is literally legitimate and thereby real, even as logic necessitates definitions of illegitimacy and the ephemeral for the latter. By this measure, sex unrecognized by law is insubstantial and transient—in short, unreal. Insofar as the law—customary, legal, and religious—defines sexuality as a function of public life in the production and maintenance of families, and families with the actual and social reproduction of itself, any sex outside of this structure is ephemeral, without public consequence. Thus, a “bastard,” strictly speaking is illegitimate spawn, an illegitimate child, one who does not exist in law insofar as it is unacknowledged by the father. Sexual relations outside legally sanctified marriage work the same way: not existing in the law, they lack substance and, in short, reality of themselves. The rule applies, theoretically at least, to extramarital—extralegal—sexual coupling, whether of a man with a not-wife woman or a not-wife man. The meaning? In this context, only marital, legally sanctioned sex is real. Beyond the law, other forms and expressions of sex lack formal authenticity; they lack, just the same, formal public vocabulary even for discussion. By this definition, a gay man—Liberace—might frolic with other men privately and secretly, precisely because such activity lacks social sanction.

  Given the judicial presumption of the state to intervene in the bedchambers of gay men, where it would not presume to invade the sanctity of the bedrooms of traditional families, this position is not without gravest difficulty for homosexuals.68 Beyond this, other problems plague the stance. For one thing, such conservative values, otherwise defined, run completely counter to the modern temper. Since the eighteenth century, Western thought has celebrated the idea that reality resides not in the social, legal, or conventional order but rather in the individual unit of society. One manifestation of this value appears in the American Declaration of Independence, with its proudly unsubstantiated assertion—the “self-evident truths”—that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” According to this notion, rights do not come not from law, society, religion, family, or other social institutions, but they rather adhere within our very existence. It makes the individual atoms of the social order the source and repository of all virtue. Thomas Jefferson, no less than John Locke or Adam Smith, judged that if left to their own devices, these virtuous individuals make a naturally harmonious order; they assumed, just so, that the public sphere—politics—is a logical, progressive expression of this harmony. Jefferson and Locke, perhaps drawing on the political capital of previous times, supposed that mankind defaulted to order and reason rather than to sexuality, desire, and passion. Insofar as appetites, sexual appetites, and plain old ordinary lust drive personal ambition, Jefferson and the theorists misjudged the man. Thus, while the author of the Declaration of Independence himself rejected any discussion of his private sexual life as an unnatural deviation from rational, political discourse, it is altogether natural, fitting even, that the twentieth century trumps his political engagement with an illicit sexual liaison with a slave woman, his African-American sister-in-law, Sally Hemmings. In effect, the sexualization of both the ends and the means of politics follows naturally from Jeffersonian assumptions.

  This shift to the personal possesses the most powerful political implications. The politicization of the personal and domestic, for example, alters the very definitions of the public and political. Thus, if the Declaration of Independence gets it one way, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gets it another, when in his Confessions he advertises his need to be beaten before he could be aroused sexually. His private sexuality, otherwise defined, becomes a notable part of his individualism, his natural rights, effectively. His individualism, in turn, is public and political of its nature. Publicizing personal sexuality, Rousseau legitimized the discussion of sexuality, which almost by definition becomes whimsical or deviant sexuality. Thus, the subject of public discourse changes even as the same process foreshadows the alteration in the process of discourse as well: the means growing as overheated as the end.69 As Western society has redefined public life, however, it has made corresponding alterations in private life. As the distinctions collapse between what is ostensibly public and private, the defenses of the more purely personal disintegrates, too. In short, no activities can be rightly termed completely private any more, if indeed they ever were.

  Like issues of sex and gender roles, questions of public and private help define public debate as the twenty-first century opens. The gay community itself mirrors the contradictions and paradoxes of the discourse. In the argument that the state has no purview over personal, sexual activity, one category upholds old distinctions between public and private. Another insists on the artificiality of this polarity itself as an invention of a powerful, manipulative state or social order, and deflects to the destruction of the state and traditional laws.70

  Although capable of a consistent aesthetic and a coherent social and psychological world view, Liberace himself made no pretense to being a thinker, systematic or otherwise. Philosophical discussions of gender, political treatises on privacy, and historical analyses of power would have baffled him. If he had never read a single political tract in his life, however, he possessed a clear sense of what virtue entailed. For all his giddy public shenanigans and private indulgences, he was intensely conservative, even reactionary. This provides, then, a context for understanding his denial of his own homosexual activity. Such activity was simply not real. He preferred 1750 to 1950, and for all his innumerable debts to modernity—for his very fame, indeed, celebrity itself—public disclosure of an inner life was incomprehensible to him. So, in an odd way, he told the truth even as he lied as he issued his testimony in a British courtroom in the late spring of 1959.71

  The jury of ten men and two women found in his favor on June 18. He won twenty-two thousand dollars, and the defendants were required to pay court costs as well. This constituted the largest settlement of any libel case in British history. It was the very verdict that Oscar Wilde had sought two generations before, and on similar grounds. Wilde had lied as flagrantly as Liberace, of course, but Wilde lost. The American entertainer redeemed that judgment. And, the showman determined, his name was cleared. Publicly and officially, he could proceed with his life. He won more than the specific verdict, too. The case proved that he would go to very great lengths indeed to fight charges of sexual deviancy. His will was obdurate and his pockets deep, as his contentious ex-lov
er would discover twenty-five years later.

  While his willingness to resort to litigation chilled discussion of his sexuality, the American press, almost inadvertently, joined the campaign as well. David Ehrenstein has chronicled journalists’ complicity in a conspiracy of silence about homosexuality before the seventies, even after. If homosexuality did not know what to call itself, the straight world hardly knew what to call it, beyond epithets, either. Namelessness actually protected gay men on the prowl in Liberace’s time. The discussion of sex, and especially of illicit sex, was the stuff of scandalmongers, but Ehrenstein has also allowed as how even the scandal rags hardly knew what to do with the topic. The exposé that outed Liberace in 1957 was anomalous. “In fact, for all their supposed sophistication,” wrote Ehrenstein, “the ‘scandal’ rags were painfully naïve when it came to same-sex matters, running such decidedly unshocking stuff as ‘Whoops! Why Those Gay Boys Just Love Bette, Joan, Tallulah and Judy!’ in the July 1964 issue of Inside Story.”72 Mainstream media demonstrated some of the same obscurity in regard to the Cassandra trial. While some papers, notably the New York Times, headlined the plaintiff’s formal assertion—“Liberace denies he is homosexual,”73—most avoided the specific terminology. The majority of broadcasters rejected the term in describing the case. Critics noted that two New York City stations employed the word “homosexual,” but that most newsmen resorted to euphemisms.74

  Publicly and officially, Liberace was not a homosexual. Privately, he continued the pattern that had characterized his life for close to twenty years. That pattern, however, like his testimony to the British court, was full of contradictions and impossibilities. He was a man who indulged in homosexual activity. He had lied. He had taken part in sex with men. He had, in truth, enjoyed a great deal of sex with a great many men.

  Evidence for sexual activity is hard to come by, especially in the case of a man like Liberace who fetished concealment, devalued gay culture, and who—rightly—considered his “deviancy” a Damoclean sword over his career. Just so, gay fraternal oaths of silence prove more obdurate than the secret codes of Masons. The paucity of data has led some to confirm the performer’s own denials of homosexuality. His first biographer interviewed a number of men who knew him well from his early television days, and they offered no evidence of his sexual inversion. “Duke Goldstone, who directed Liberace for long hours daily and traveled across the country with him, saw nothing. Nor did Paul Weston, who worked intimately with Liberace on record albums. There were no willowy young men in his entourage, nothing like that. Everyone simply thought he was a mama’s boy.” In the absence of “willowy young men”—sissies, flits, and queens, otherwise defined—in his entourage, Bob Thomas concludes that Liberace was merely “confused about his sexual identity” and that he “suppressed the homosexual side of his nature.”75 He misjudged.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation knew better. Thus, the agency kept a file on the showman entitled “compromise and extortion of homosexuals.”76 Scott Thorson knew better, too. Liberace’s companion of five years, Thorson memorialized the performer’s own recollections of his early sexuality, and Behind the Candelabra offers a logical starting place for reconstructing the showman’s earliest homosexual history. Underlining his sense of privacy or secrecy even with his lover is the fact that Liberace disliked speaking of the past and even hushed those who did so in the younger man’s presence. He did repeat the story, however, of his first lover, the remarkable episode with the Green Bay Packers lineman. The showman also revealed that even while dating Joanne Rio publicly, “he continued to have secret dates with young men.”77 If mostly without reference to specifics, Liberace also revealed how he lived before his fame. In the early days, he told Thorson, “no one had ever questioned his sexual preference. It had never been an issue as long as he didn’t flaunt his lifestyle,” remembered the young lover. He wasn’t scaring horses. “He’d been able to quietly patronize known homosexual bars and clubs without attracting undue attention. In the gay vernacular, he’d ‘tricked around’ with a series of lovers, many of them struggling performers, too. After ten years on the circuit, he was familiar with gay hangouts in every city where he appeared—and he had frequented them all.”78 Fame altered this pattern, constricted his freedom, and forced new arrangements on the performer.

  According to Thorson, again, Liberace now indulged his sexual appetites through an extensive network of gay friends, several of whom worked on his staff. These men assisted in the performer’s assignations. Liberace arranged these encounters, in Thorson’s telling, in a North Hollywood apartment near the Valley Vista house. “Lee’s closest associates were gay men who worked for him. When Lee needed companionship or a sexual encounter he called men he knew and trusted. In turn they’d call a friend, or a friend of a friend, until they found someone who could deliver the kind of kid that appealed to Lee. Then a meeting would be arranged. For Lee, it was as easy as snapping his fingers, and almost as risk free.”79

  While this essentially describes the way Thorson himself found his way into the master bedroom, one even earlier account confirms the norm. As a young street hustler, the writer John Rechy encountered the showman under identical circumstances. It was the late fifties; Lee still made his home at the piano-pool house in the valley. Rechy knew a couple of Liberace’s former boyfriends. They invited him to dinner with the performer. “I didn’t realize,” Rechy related, “that I was being offered to him by my hosts.”80

  There were other men, and many other ways of getting them. While his patron spoke reluctantly, if at all, about his old loves, Thorson had gotten wind of some of them. Thus, for example, he treats the rumor of the romance between his boyfriend and that other most famous closeted gay star, Rock Hudson. He dismisses it. Rock wasn’t Lee’s type, he sniffs. They were too much alike, he insists.

  Most important, they both had giant egos; they were stars and the rest of the world (friends, lovers, family) damn well better not forget it. That alone would have negated any possibility of those two having a relationship. Men like that cannot tolerate equals. Had Lee and Rock actually met, I think they would have disliked each other on sight. They were much too much alike to fulfill each other’s needs and too egocentric to want to try. Such an encounter would have been more the clash of rutting stags than the true meeting of minds. In the years we were together, Lee never mentioned knowing Rock. . . . The two men moved in completely different circles, socially and professionally.81

  Thorson’s incredulity notwithstanding, such an affair did occur, by Rock Hudson’s own admission. Hudson, along with John Rechy and Thorson himself, was an exception to the generally rigorous homosexual rule of kiss, don’t tell.

  Hudson had revealed the circumstances of the affair to Boze Hadleigh, a Hollywood writer and the author of Conversations with My Elders, interviews with six gay or bisexual men in the film industry, of which Hudson was one. Hadleigh omitted the Liberace revelation from his text because he refused to “out” anyone against their will. Liberace died on February 4, 1987; two days later, newspapers carried the news of the sexual liaison between the two celebrities.82 In a second book on homosexuality in Hollywood in 1996, Hollywood Gays, Hadleigh returned to the Hudson affair, this time discussing it at greater length.83 Interviewing the movie star, Hadleigh related how Hudson had first alluded to the affair. Incredulous, the writer asked for details. Hudson described the liaison. “It was just a few weeks—a fling, fun while it lasted,” said Hudson. “Lee was very patronizing. A kind man, generous, and we shared an interest in classical music. His piano-playing knocked me out. But he was quite patronizing even then, and he treated everybody like his protégé.”84

  What Hudson told Hadleigh offers a new take on both men, even as it illuminates obscure corners of homosexual culture in the fifties. Protesting rumors of the affair, Scott Thorson had objected that Hudson was not Lee’s type, nor vice versa. Hudson liked “handsome younger hunks. Preferably blond ones.”85 Thorson defines something of the sam
e type, if younger perhaps, for Lee. Liberace and Hudson, then, were each very far from the other’s supposed ideal. What of that? One closeted Hollywood publicist considered the “type problem” minor. For Hudson, he judged, the default was not to type but to power. Rock, he insisted, “was something of a groupie. He’d go to bed with big names, or try to. Especially when he first arrived in Hollywood and was chasing after his idols Jon Hall and Errol Flynn.”86 There is another answer to the problem, too: typing is not particularly relevant to pickup or casual sex. Fragmentary evidence suggests that this was a form of sex, too, that fit Liberace’s taste, in particular. According to the recollections of “Rick Shaw,” who idolized Liberace but went to bed with Hudson, the tall, dark movie star was not rigid on this issue, either.

  Thorson also speculated that the two could not have been lovers because of their mutually vaulting egos. “They were much too much alike to fulfill each other’s needs and too egocentric to want to try,” Thorson insisted. Hadleigh’s evidence suggests, however, that the two men’s needs were rather more primitive than intellectual or spiritual communion. At the same time, Thorson did come close to something in discussing the two men’s egos. If ego did not keep the two apart, it hastened, by Hudson’s own reckoning, their separation. Twice in his short recollection, Hudson referred to the pianist as patronizing—one manifestation of the ego Thorson noted. At the time of their affair, in the very early fifties, Hudson remained only a contract actor, playing roles like that of Taza, Son of Cochise and spouting such deathless lines as “Taza will build Una’s wikiup.” He was not yet the star of Magnificent Obsession, much less the megastar of Giant (1956) and Pillow Talk (1959). If his ambition was no less vaulting in 1953 than it would be in ’56 or ’59—and, one might add, no less grandiose than Liberace’s at any time—he had little basis for boasting earlier. He was not, in effect, the piano player’s equal when they trysted, probably in 1952 or 1953. They may or may not have met like stags in heat, but, clearly, Thorson’s notions of Liberace’s ego corresponds to Hudson’s description of the showman as “patronizing.”87